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APR: your source for nuclear news and analysis since April 16, 2010

Saturday, June 5, 2010

This sounds bad! Oh, wait.. it isn't.

I see today that ten or twelve news articles have exploded onto the net about supposed major problems found when a preparedness drill was run in the vicinity of the Beaver Valley facility in April. Articles like this one try feebly to trump up some kind of fear, but in fact the article is so short that it's really impossible to get all up in arms even if you know nothing about nuclear energy.

Why not "Oil Spill Drill Reveals Several Operational Deficiencies?" Or how about "Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Simulation Reveals Disturbing Results?" See, the problem here is (and has been) the 'golly gosh gee whiz oh my, lions and tigers and bears' mentality that brought us Greenpeace and the movie "The China Syndrome" and which has fueled fear of the nuclear energy field for decades now. Let's just go ahead and compare the physical, social and economic impact of the Three Mile Island accident and.. oh, I dunno... let's pick the Deepwater Horizon incident. Will anyone do that? Yes, they will. Or "he" will. That is, I will.

Let's start now. Number of personnel killed directly in all Class V Nuclear Accidents at reactors in the United States: Three (all at one accident, SL-1.) Number of personnel killed directly in Deepwater Horizon Incident: Eleven. The rest of the comparisons will be similar in final result, although very probably in much larger magnitudes.